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Watch Your Language

I’m a genius. I’ve known this for some time but due to an overdeveloped sense of empathy for all the people way more stupider than me, I try not to talk about it too much. So it is indeed surprising that I’m not yet fluent in French. Maybe I’m subconsciously dialing my intelligence down a notch. I don’t want the locals to be intimidated by how fast a Canadian woman can master the bon usage of one of the most ridiculously complicated languages invented by man. I don’t mean ‘man’ as in human, I mean man as in male because there’s no way a woman came up with that mess. She wouldn’t have had time.

Anyway, now that my manuscript has finally been sent off it’s time for me to get back to the task of verbs and partitive articles. I know it’s time because people (Elodie) have been telling me that my French has relapsed and needs to go back to rehab. Everybody knows how much I love French. And everybody knows how it flows off my tongue with no effort at all. Now everybody knows that I’m a big fat liar.

Christ almighty, it’s some friggin’ hard. I think at this point it would just be easier to move to Italy and start over. At least I’d have a chance with the Italian R sound plus Berlusconi’s gone and that makes everything less difficult. Things are so bad on the French front that I actually unearthed Neil’s Italian textbooks yesterday just so I could practice saying some foreign words properly. Non-geniuses may not immediately recognize the wisdom of this strategy but a fine mind works in mysterious ways.

In the bag with the Italian books I found just the thing for one as gifted as myself. From the producers of the award winning …

comes the exciting new holiday blockbuster …

This is a timely discovery as my response, “I don’t know what in the jesus you’re saying to me because instead of actually learning French I spent a whole bloody year writing about how hard this goddamn language is. So suck me arse,” has become predictable given its frequency of use.

Ah yes, The Easy Way. It turns out that all this time I had been doing it the hard way. Not surprising, that’s how most geniuses roll. Psychiatrist brainiacs in particular have a tendency to make things more complicated than they need to be. But if I hadn’t thought of studying Italian to improve my French I never would have found this book. They don’t call me Madame Einstein for nothing.

I should have enough empathy not to tell you this, but — a few years ago, when I was married, his teen aged son and my sister went with us on a car trip to Montreal, and I kept forgetting to look at the little French/English dictionary I bought for the trip. Yet after a few days there, I suddenly became the one who understood more and more signs and snippets of French that continued to make the others stop like deer in headlights.

I’ve always wondered how good I would have got if we could’ve stayed for a month. Of course, I’ve forgotten it all now.

I always think the best way to begin learning a new language is by first memorizing some effective curses. I don’t know why but it always makes the process a whole lot more bearable. If I may be permitted to speak candidly, allow me to teach you how to say the universally recognized “f-you” in French. Va te faire encule. And if you’re ever in Holland and feeling frisky, I can teach you how to ask someone to have sex with you in the kitchen. But that’s another lesson for another day.

“They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no (…)”
Here is the deal Madame, from now, you’ll speak French, I’ll speak English and we correct each other. Our conversations are going to become more, well, spicy!

“Psychiatrist brainiacs in particular have a tendency to make things more complicated than they need to be.”
The truth hurts I know, but its better if you say it yourself rather than hear it from a knuckle dragging surgeon. What provoked you to try to do anything so hard after age 10? Adult humans are not capable of this thing you try to do. I will eat French fries today in your honor as you ride your donkey on the doomed mission of slaying the French language windmill.

*Sigh* After six months of trying to brush up on my self-taught French through six months of classes, I still found this summer that the only one with whom I could converse freely was a four-year old. And we celebrated by singing Frere Jacques together. I long to be a brilliant dinner companion and attend French philosophy cafes, but no amount of classes will produce that.

I do agree that Italian is way easier (especially now that Berlusca is gone) as it’s phonetic and I swear you could pick up La Repubblica and read like a local first go. Try doing that with Libération and someone will hit you with it.